In 2015, Jessica Hopper published “The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic,” which gathered reviews, profiles and broader cultural musings that Hopper had written for a wide variety of zines, alternative weeklies and mainstream music publications. Her new memoir, “Night Moves,” takes us inside her diaries. It’s composed of brief, impressionistic pieces, starting in 2004, that she wrote while living in Chicago (where she’s still based). A love letter to the city, it’s also a glimpse into Hopper’s friendships and her time navigating the scene that she was documenting in her public work. Below, she talks about her early writing on blogs, changes in music culture, the band that serves as a “beacon and guidepost for almost everything” she does and more. This interview has been condensed and edited.
Q: When did you first get the idea to write this book?
A: The idea for this book didn’t exactly come from me. Putting together my previous book, which is an anthology of about 15 years of my criticism, involved rereading almost everything I’d ever written — published and not. In 2014 or 2015, I was going through it with my friend Alice, and she said, “You have a bunch of writing about Chicago and hanging out and going to shows that doesn’t fit with this book, but I think you need to go back to it at some point.” Those things came from blogs I had had, fanzines I had made at that time, different writing that wasn’t music criticism, that wasn’t reviews of records.
Once I put it together, I saw that it very much documented this ephemeral music scene. It witnessed a time that’s the twilight of this moment before the ubiquity of smartphones, a time of great change in my neighborhood, a wave of gentrification that I was part of. It also witnessed a period where I’m jumping into my life as a young writer, and also a time where my friends are my family, when I’m in love with all my friends. It was like this liminal space between what was and what is, and it felt useful to bring that document forward — even just the stuff about what it was like to participate in music culture before everyone was documenting it on Instagram.
Q: What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?
A: There’s a line in there that says, “If I’m not living my most hopeful politics at the ripe old age of 29, then what am I doing?” To read that at 40 — the first time I came back upon it, even though it was something I had written — it redirected me as a writer in my real life, in my current life as a suburban mom, as someone who’s working on her fourth book. Young me kind of put the screws to old me. In some ways the thing that I’m most grateful for about doing this book is getting to see the things that have progressed and not; the distance that I’ve staked — and not — between my younger, perhaps more idealistic, self and my geriatric cynicism.
Q: In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?
A: Writing these blogs, whether this was true or not, you had this sense of writing to your friends, your community, because who else cared? Music at that time was more like a cloister. There was a sense that you were within the realm of the underground, and there was a particular lingua franca, and certain ways that you would shorthand things. Sometimes, when I was going back and revising, I was refining to offer more context because I did want to let people in more — pulling back a little and contextualizing something that, if you were in that world at that time, needed no explanation. Certainly there’s my own weird slang and use of language — abuse of language — still in there. But putting things into a book a decade later, I wanted to crack open this world a little bit more.
Some little moments are documents of things that were important then. Maybe we don’t need a full oral history of the hot-dog stand that stayed open till 4 a.m. that was the place where punks leaving this venue across the street would encounter the jocks and people from other parts of town who were coming in as the new denizens of the neighborhood. But at the time, that was a crucial place. When you look back, even in these glimpses, it sets the stage in some ways for what these neighborhoods have become, a decade later.
Q: Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?
A: The central influence on what I do and how I do it is a luminary post-punk band from D.C. called Fugazi. Since I was a teenager, it’s served as a beacon and guidepost for almost everything that I do. It seems kind of ludicrous, in 2018, that there would have been a band that showed up at some point and said, “We’re not just going to make good records but we’re going to provide a framework by which to live.” But Fugazi was that for me and a lot of folks I know, because they gave us a way of doing it ourselves.
The big way that they’ve been most influential to me, and that I think about on almost a daily basis, is that they didn’t really advertise their records above ground. They weren’t trying to push to the mainstream. I interviewed Ian MacKaye, Fugazi’s co-founder, once when I was 19, and he said: “Fugazi isn’t for everybody. It’s for the people who want it and need it, and they’re going to dig until they find it.” To me, that idea is very present in the product of this book.
Q: Persuade someone to read “Night Moves” in 50 words or less.
A: It’s a book about falling in love with a city. And if you’ve ever been someone who’s truly fallen in love with a city, and been thrilled to discover your place in it, it’s a book for you.
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Publication Notes:
‘Night Moves’
By Jessica Hopper
165 pages. University of Texas Press. $15.95.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.